Amazon launches new capabilities across Routines, Music, Smart Home, Home Monitoring, Alexa Calling, Amazon FreeTime on Alexa and more; features begin rolling out to select new and existing Echo devices in the coming months.

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CE Pro Editors
· September 21, 2018

SEATTLE--Sep. 20, 2018-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)—Alongside a new lineup of Echo devices, Amazon today introduced new Alexa features that help make life even more convenient, safe, and entertaining. New capabilities include entertainment features like left-right stereo pairing, TIDAL, and Amazon Music New Release Notifications; productivity features like email management, step-by-step cooking, and location-based Routines; smart home and home monitoring features like Alexa Guard, Hunches, and Local Voice Control; and FreeTime on Alexa features like kid-focused Routines, podcasts, new skills, and more.

“The Alexa service is always getting smarter, whether you’re using the Echo you bought three years ago or an Echo Show you buy tomorrow. We have thousands of engineers and scientists inventing on behalf of customers, and today we’re excited to introduce even more features to help make customers’ lives simpler, safer, and more convenient,” said Tom Taylor, Senior Vice President, Amazon Alexa. “Soon customers will be able to manage their email, easily secure their home, watch the shows they love on Echo Show, and make their daily routines more productive—all just by asking Alexa.”

“Over the past year we’ve made incredible scientific advances in Alexa’s Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). We have applied deep neural networks to advance Alexa's ability to detect challenging acoustic phenomena such as whispered speech and anomalous events like glass breaking; made breakthroughs in combining transfer learning and deep learning to teach Alexa new languages and capabilities faster; improved contextual understanding and added memory to help customers discover skills and ask follow-up questions more naturally; and used active learning and unsupervised learning to improve foundational wake word detection, speech recognition, and natural language understanding,” said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist, Amazon Alexa. “We’ve only scratched the surface of A.I.-powered inventions and we’ll continue to invent ways to make Alexa more useful for our customers.”

Make Your Home Smarter and Safer

Alexa Guard

Alexa can help keep your home safe when you’re away with Alexa Guard–just say, “Alexa, I’m leaving” to activate Guard. When you enable Guard, Alexa can send you Smart Alerts about the sound of glass-breaking, smoke detectors, or carbon monoxide alarms detected in your home. Alexa can also intuitively turn lights on and off to help deter intruders using Away Lighting and can integrate with alarm systems from Ring and ADT to keep your home safe. This feature will be available on select Echo devices later this year.

Hunches

As you interact with your smart home, Alexa learns more about your day-to-day usage and can sense when connected smart devices such as lights, locks, switches, and plugs are not in the state that you prefer. For example, if your living room light is on when you say “Alexa, good night,” Alexa will respond with “Good night. By the way, your living room light is on. Do you want me to turn it off?” This feature will be available later this year.

Frustration Free Setup

We want to remove the frustration of connecting new smart home devices to Wi-Fi by making it as simple as plugging them in. As a first step toward realizing this vision, we’re rolling out Wi-Fi simple setup so customers can automatically connect smart devices to their Wi-Fi network and Alexa. Wi-Fi simple setup is initially available with new Echo devices, the new Amazon Smart Plug, and AmazonBasics Microwave. Additional devices will be added in the future.

Local Voice Control

When there’s an internet outage, or if you’re in an area with unreliable internet connection, Local Voice Control allows you to still use your voice to control lights, plugs, and switches that are connected to an Echo device with a built-in smart home hub, such as the all-new Echo Plus or all-new Echo Show.

Video Doorbell

In the coming weeks, Echo Show devices will have a 2-way talk feature that works with Ring and August doorbell cameras. When the doorbell rings or motion is detected by the security camera, just say “Alexa, answer the front door” to see and talk to whoever is there without having to open the door. Additionally, Alexa will be able to play a chime and make an announcement when someone rings your Ring and August doorbell cameras. You can also use Alexa Routines to play custom announcements when the front door camera detects movement or someone rings the doorbell.

Alexa Makes Your Life More Convenient

New Alexa Routines

Customize your daily routine more than ever before through adding location-based Alexa Routines that trigger when you leave or arrive at home or work. Plus add timed delays in between Alexa Routine actions; add time-limited music—great for white noise or sleep sounds; and add temperature and motion based Alexa Routines that trigger when the temperature in a room is too high or too low, or when motion is detected.

Location-Based Reminders

You can set reminders to trigger when you leave or arrive at home or work. Simply say, “Alexa, remind me to take the chicken out when I get home,” and when you arrive, Alexa will automatically speak the reminder and send a notification to your phone.

Ask Alexa to do multiple things at once within one request. For example, add several items to your shopping list by saying “Alexa, add bananas, paper towels, and cat food to my shopping list;” or turn the Echo volume up and start a playlist by saying, “Alexa, play Pandora at volume 8.”

Email Integration

If you need to manage your personal inbox but aren’t able to sit with your computer or smartphone, all you need to do is ask Alexa to check and reply to email through Gmail, Outlook.com, and Hotmail.com. Simply link your email in your Alexa app and say, “Alexa, do I have emails from Sarah?”

Whisper Mode

Gone are the days of waking up your spouse or partner to ask Alexa for the weather in the morning or turn your alarm off. Whisper Mode is a new feature that allows you to whisper to Alexa, and she will whisper her response back to you.

Even More Calling Options

Skype voice and video calling with Alexa will allow customers to connect with the hundreds of millions of people using Skype around the world. Just say, “Alexa, call Jimmy on Skype” to quickly connect with Jimmy anywhere he uses Skype.

Built-In Web Browser

Echo Show now has a built-in web browser that can be opened by saying, “Alexa, open Silk” or “Alexa, open Firefox.” Once open, you can use the on-screen keyboard to type a URL and visit your favorite website. And like other browsers, you can bookmark your favorite websites for easy access.

Alexa Makes Life More Entertaining

New Music Service – TIDAL

Later this year, global music streaming platform TIDAL will be available on all Echo devices. This service leverages the new Music Skill API also announced today. Learn more about the developer benefits of the new, self-service Music Skill API: www.developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/

Left-Right Stereo Pairing

With the new left-right stereo pairing feature, you can connect two of the same, supported Echo devices for stereo sound.

Amazon Music New Release Notifications

With Amazon Music’s New Release Notifications, customers will soon be able to ask Alexa to follow their favorite artist, and receive notifications on their Echo device or within the Amazon Music mobile app when an artist releases a new album or track. After asking to hear the new album or track, customers will also be surprised to hear some of their favorite artists’ voices delivering the message themselves on their Echo.

Overlapping Groups

With overlapping groups, you can add one Echo device to several multi-room music groups. For example, the Echo in your kitchen can be included in both the “Kitchen” group for daily listening, and the “Downstairs” group when you’re having friends over on the weekend.

Preferred Speaker Setup

Set your preferred speaker for music playback in your Alexa app—be it an Echo device, a third-party AVS speaker, or a multi-room music group. When you want to play music in that space, simply say “Alexa, play rock music” and it will stream from your preferred speaker.

New Video Services for Echo Show

Integrations with Fire TV Recast, Hulu, and NBC will make live TV viewing and on-demand streaming available on any Echo Show. Simply say “Alexa, watch Good Morning America” to watch the news with your morning coffee, or “Alexa, tune to ESPN on Hulu” to catch up with your favorite sports team. Click here to learn more about the new Echo Show.

Skills and Games for the Screen

Tens of thousands of skills are available on the all-new Echo Show, including many visually enhanced experiences. You can get up to the minute stock information and news updates at a glance with CNBC, quickly check your Capital One balance, play Who Wants to be a Millionaire or turn anytime into story time with the Amazon Storytime skill.

Visual Alexa Blueprints

With the new Greeting Card Blueprint, you can create and share personalized greeting cards to celebrate birthdays, friendships, and other special occasions.

All-New FreeTime on Alexa Features

Kid Routines

Parents can now easily set Routines with FreeTime on Alexa using a set of simple pre-configured Alexa Routines. For example, parents can enable the Good Night Routine in the Alexa app, and when parents or kids say, “Alexa, good night,” Alexa will offer a parent-customized goodnight message, tell them an interesting fact, turn off the lights, turn on the night light, and start sleep sounds or white noise. After School, Bed Time, and Good Morning Routines can also be customized with white noise timers, smart home controls, music, personalized Alexa messages, and more.

Kid Podcasts

Kids already love listening to Audible through FreeTime Unlimited on Alexa, and soon FreeTime Unlimited customers will have over 1,000 Audible books available to enjoy. To offer even more content, using Amazon FreeTime Unlimited on Alexa, kids can listen to popular kid and family podcasts, including Brain’s On from American Public Media, Story Pirates from Gimlet Media, and Ear Snacks from Andrew and Polly. These podcasts offer educational and age-appropriate news, stories, and more.

Kid Activity Skills

New FreeTime Unlimited on Alexa skills like Train Like an Avenger and Animal Workout help get families active and moving together, all while using their imagination. Plus new skills like Oregon Trail, Star Wars Missions, and Animal Rescue offer fun and educational content.

The custom electronics industry saw a healthy 8 percent growth rate in 2018, down slightly from the blazing 11 percent growth in 2017 but still admiringly strong. Our 2019 State of the Industry indicates that readers expect to see even more growth in 2019. Get your copy today.